‘B-S’ PATROL #3: BUMPERS-SASSER DON’T GET IT — GREATEST WASTE WILL COME FROM NOT MAKING MORE HASTE ON SDI

(Washington, D.C.): A key issue in the
debate engendered by an initiative by
Sens. Dale Bumpers (D-AR) and Jim Sasser
(D-TN) to gut the SDI program revolves
around the pace with which strategic
defenses are being — and should be —
developed. In proposing to cut as much as
$1 billion from the FY1993 defense bill
recommended by the Senate Armed Services
Committee (and fully $2.1 billion, or 37
percent, out of the Administration’s
request), Sens. Bumpers and Sasser have
criticized the Pentagon for proceeding
too quickly and with undue technical
risk.

Central to such a claim is the
Senators’ argument that, in response to
direction from Congress last year to
field strategic defenses by 1996 or as
soon as possible thereafter, the
Administration has structured the current
SDI approach so as to realize a premature
Initial Operational Capability (IOC). In
part that criticism is a product of their
mistaken view of the threat; in part it
derives from a misunderstanding of the
nature of SDIO’s Global Protection
Against Limited Strikes (GPALS) program.

Self-serving Misuse of
Intelligence

As discussed at length in the Center’s
Decision Brief entitled “‘B-S’
Patrol: Sens. Bumpers and Sasser Wish
Away Ballistic Missile Threat, Propose to
Leave U.S. Vulnerable to It,”
(No. 92-D 101,
29 August 1992), Sens. Bumpers and Sasser
appear unduly sanguine about the emerging
problem for U.S. security posed by the
proliferation of ballistic missile
technology. Specifically, during Senate
debate on their amendment on 7 August,
they made much of the intelligence
community’s judgment that the United
States will not be threatened by Third
World ballistic missiles until
sometime around the end of the decade.

It is reckless and
irresponsible to propose postponing
deployment of missile defenses on the
grounds that a serious threat which U.S.
intelligence agrees will emerge at
some point is presently not expected
to materialize until somewhere between
2000 and 2002. The long, sorry
record of intelligence miscalculations,
overly optimistic assumptions and
strategic — to say nothing of tactical
— surprises makes it most imprudent to
“bet the farm” that this
estimate is a sure thing.

In fact, faced with the likelihood of
a burgeoning Third World missile problem
— to say nothing of the existing
ballistic missile threat from China and
several of the successors to the Soviet
Union — the United States should
make every effort to realize the 1997
initial operational capability (IOC) that
Sens. Bumpers and Sasser have maligned.
At the very least, Congress should do
nothing that would ensure that such an
operational deployment is postponed for
years into the future beyond 1997.

At This Rate, We’ll Be Lucky
To Have a Defense by the Year 2002!

Unfortunately, as a result principally
of past congressional cuts in and
hamstringing of the SDI program, there
is now no chance that the United
States will have an initial deployment of
production-quality sensors and
interceptors deployed to defend the
country by 1997. This fact has
been reflected in the Pentagon’s present
GPALS program: The earliest such an IOC
can now be achieved is roughly 2002.

Interestingly, even as Sens. Bumpers
and Sasser have criticized the Defense
Department for rushing to deploy
strategic defenses too hastily (i.e., by
1997), they have acknowledged this
reality. Indeed, the Senators have cited
the fact that the current IOC date is
actually five years later to
support their claim that the GPALS
program needs far fewer dollars in FY1993
than either the Pentagon or the Armed
Services Committee believes are required.

There is, of course, no demonstrable
basis for such a contention. Ambassador
Henry Cooper — in unusually blunt
language — took exception this week to
the Bumpers-Sasser plan saying, “It
is no serious acquisition program.”
He added that, if enacted, that plan
would leave “no viable SDI
development program beyond theater
missile defenses.”

Interim Capability Would
Mitigate Danger of Delay

Particularly worrisome is the prospect
that the funding levels for FY1993 — and
the out-years — anticipated by the
Bumpers-Sasser initiative would
jeopardize not only the 2002 IOC. They
would also preclude SDIO from introducing
any contingency capability before
the IOC system becomes available.

That option is currently being built
into the GPALS acquisition program
through the concept of deployable
prototype interceptors. This approach,
known as the User Operational Evaluation
System (UOES), will allow the United
States to field a very modest, emergency
anti-missile force possibly by as
early as 1997 should the need arise.

There are valuable precedents for such
a stop-gap arrangement. It was, for
example, employed successfully during
Desert Storm with the deployment of
R&D aircraft equipped with the
revolutionary JSTARS radars. Similarly,
the Patriot PAC II missile (recently
lauded by Gov. Clinton for its
performance during the Gulf War) amounted
to a contingency capability; it was not
supposed to go into production until
February 1993 and was manufactured and
fielded on an emergency basis before it
had been fully tested.

Interestingly, the UOES strategy has
properly been incorporated into the
recently signed contract for the Theater
High Altitude Atmospheric Defense (THAAD)
system. This step will permit prototype
missiles to be available for emergency
use in theater defense missions by late
1996 or early 1997.

Common sense suggests that the United
States itself should have no less of an
insurance policy as that we might provide
to friends, allies and U.S. forces
deployed overseas. Particularly given the
real uncertainty about the imminence of
the threat — and the unduly long
lead-times involved in getting a
production-worthy strategic defensive
system on line — it would be the height
of folly to preclude such an interim
measure at this juncture.

The Bottom Line: Don’t
Delay

The Center for Security Policy
believes that confusion and
misrepresentation about the nature of the
Pentagon’s schedule for deployment of
strategic defenses — and the impact of a
further $1 billion cut on that schedule
— may have caused otherwise responsible
Senators to support an irresponsible
amendment when the Bumpers-Sasser
proposal was considered last month.

In light of the reality that past
budgetary decisions have already
postponed the deployment of defenses
beyond the point when they are likely to
be desperately needed, and in view of the
fact that the Bumpers-Sasser cut would
delay that deployment further and
eliminate the possibility of creating an
interim, contingency capability, the
Senate’s course is clear: It must reject
any and all legislative initiatives that
would have such a disastrous effect on
the national security.

CORRECTION

Subsequent to
publication of the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled, “‘Getting
to No‘ on SDI: Congressional
Staff Don’t Let Constitution, Members Get
in Way of Defense Bill” ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=92-D_106″>No. 92-D 106, 9
September 1992), we learned that it was
in error on a key point. The Center Brief
correctly indicated that congressional
staff are, at the direction of the House
and Senate Armed Services Committee
leaderships, engaged in a highly
irregular conference on the FY1993
Defense authorization bill before
the Senate finishes its consideration of
that legislation. Members of the Senate
committee have been consulted about this
practice and not objected to it.

The reports cited in the Decision
Brief to the effect that Armed
Services staffers have reached a
compromise on SDI funding are evidently
unfounded, however. In fact, the staff
conferees have properly been enjoined
from negotiating compromises on funding
for strategic defense and several other
key programs. Unfortunately, there is
reason to believe that the Senate Defense
Appropriations Committee —
scheduled to mark-up its version of the
Pentagon’s FY’93 spending bill on 15
September — has settled on the $3.8
billion figure of which we warned in the Brief.

While the Center very much regrets the
error on this point, its bottom line is
unchanged: The full Senate should
reject further, draconian cuts in the SDI
budget — cuts that will preclude
fulfillment of the Missile Defense Act it
pioneered last year. For its part, the
Bush Administration should make it clear
that such legislation faces a certain
veto.

– 30 –

1. This
Decision Brief is the third in a
series examining various untenable
arguments offered by Sens. Bumpers and
Sasser to justify an amendment that would
gut the Global Protection Against Limited
Strikes system.